The FAA tries to stop a flight-sharing start-up.
Flying commercial airlines is increasingly difficult. Long TSA lines this summer only compound peoples’ anger over high fees and cramped seats. Much better to fly private — that is, if you can afford it. But is it even possible to bring private air travel to the masses?
“While advertising shared flights over beers at a bar or through a paper pinned to a bulletin board is still completely legal in France [and the U.S.], apparently an online platform that offers verified information on passengers and pilots poses a threat to public safety.”
Flytenow was designed to do just that. The company’s founders, Alan Guichard and Matt Voska, developed an online platform to match individual pilots with passengers willing to share the expenses of flying. (See Jared Meyer’s interview with Flytenow’s founders.) While Flytenow was in operation, people could fly in private planes from, for example, Boston to Martha’s Vineyard in under an hour and for less than $70.
The Federal Aviation Administration shut Flytenow down. The FAA determined that pilots who partner with Flytenow are “common carriers” (the same classification for United Airlines, JetBlue, and other commercial airlines), even though the pilots could not make a profit from passengers — they could only defray a proportional amount of flight expenses. Common-carrier designation comes with myriad onerous regulations, including expensive licensing fees and heightened liability, forcing Flytenow to close.
Flytenow is not the only flight-sharing start-up that has been opposed by regulators. Wingly, Europe’s leading flight-sharing company, is under attack in its home country, France. French aviation regulators are creating new rules to prevent it from operating there.
In Europe, France stands alone in this fight against affordable private air travel. Emeric de Waziers, one of Wingly’s founders, told us that the company entered the German market in February 2016, and the U.K. market in July 2016, to prove to the French government that there is nothing crazy or dangerous about an online platform for sharing flight expenses. Not only did the aviation administrations of Germany and the United Kingdom confirm that Wingly was legally allowed to operate, but the EU’s European Aviation Safety Administration gave its seal of approval as well. If France continues to place restrictive laws on flight sharing, EU law requires the French government to prove that doing so is a response to a direct public-safety problem.
One of the French government’s main complaints against Wingly is that online flight-sharing services do not provide adequate information to passengers, leading to their possible endangerment. While advertising shared flights over beers at a bar or through a paper pinned to a bulletin board is still completely legal in France...
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Jared Meyer is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Economics21. Follow him on Twitter here. Andrew Meleta is a contributor to Economics21.
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online